Rob Cottingham’s excellent cartoon is part of my subject for this posting: My OS X 10.5 Leopard install: The Wrath of Shere Khan. (I know, I know, Shere Khan was a Tiger, not a Leopard, but the Star Trek Pun was just too good to pass up, and besides, my upgrade to ‘Tiger’ was just fine, and happened years ago.). Last Sunday I thought I’d try and install this brand new Mac OS on my desktop system, a Dual-processor G5 that used to be the King of the Hill, back when Mac’s used the PowerPC chip…(oh well…).
Well, it didn’t go so well. The first attempt at an upgrade started, and then after a minute or two aborted itself. When I brought the machine back to life, it wouldn’t boot off the internal drive any more, but would boot off the new system install DVD. The upgrade installer now said that in order to install the new OS, I would need to first erase the hard disk and then install. ‘OK’ , I said. ‘Good thing I had a backup of everything.’ (I’d had the good sense to duplicate everything to an external drive on Saturday night, which I could now boot off of. So no panicking, I hadn’t really lost anything.) ‘All right, I’ll install a new system, and then migrate all of my applications, files, etc. to it using the Migration Assistant program from Apple. That usually works.’
So, Install attempt 2 began. It worked with no apparent problems. It wiped the disk and installed a brand new, virgin copy of OS X 10.5. I registered the software, and then ran the Migration Assistant. Some 3 hours later, I rebooted the Mac to find a computer that was essentially running like a slow-motion movie. I could start it up, click on things or double-click to open them, but they responded minutes later. *Sigh* This wouldn’t do. So, with the hour growing late, I went off to bed.
The next evening (after work), I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to install the virgin system again (Install 2, Attempt 3, for the record), and then, rather than running the Migration Assistant (which had moved all of the old junk over from my old system effectively bringing my new system to a standstill), I’d have to rebuild my system bit-by-bit, the old fashioned way. That was Monday.
Today is Thursday, and I’m nearly back. Most apps have been reinstalled, with a few notable exceptions (Adobe Creative Suite Version 2, which is a behemoth and Microsoft Office for Macintosh have yet to be put in, and ‘The Missing Sync’ – which I use to sync my Treo and Audio Hijack – which I use to record radio shows from Boston via the Internet, will be the last additions). However, iLife and iWork are on there, along with my iTunes library and iPhoto pictures. The fact is, I’m running out of disk space pretty quickly. I think the time has come to migrate my iTunes library to an external drive, as my ‘Music’ Folder now takes up nearly 100 Gig. While I love many features of the new OS, it would have been nice to have been a quick and simple upgrade. The fact is, I’d simply accumulated too much digital grime in the old system, and the new one was probably incompatible with 1 (or maybe more) things running in the background that I might not have even been using any more!
So, was it the Unsanity Application Enancer that got you directly, or because you installed the Logitech mouse driver?
Unsanity, for sure, plus a couple of others that I suspect might have also been a problem as they are sort of ‘invisible’ and launched at login: TypeIt4Me, MenuClockCalendar, the monitor for RadioShark, Plaxo and iScrobbler), to name a few. Man, that stuff just builds up over time.
Ouch! As it was, I was going to delay upgrading my Mac to Leopard for a few months. One of my current projects involves a bunch of Acrobat-related work. Adobe projects that Acrobat’s Leopard compatibility update won’t be ready until January, and I didn’t want to risk running into snags. While I don’t run any haxies on my Mac, I think Apple should compensate for the widely-used ones in their upgrade programs — whether blessed by Apple or not, it is how their machines are used in the read world.
Did a virgin install of Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop box last month. (I’d been running a bunch of experimental software, so it was time to start clean. For normal users, the upgrade would have been fine.) It took about 35 minutes, including a round of partition-tweaking that wasn’t strictly necessary. Everything was detected correctly, even graphics and printing. Follow up with a sudo apt-get install [pre-prepared list of stuff I gotta have], hit the sack and let it run. Not much else to say about it, really.
I would love to try out a box with Ubuntu, just to play around with it (something else to do with my copious free time these days). Running that cubic Desktop switcher, as well as some of the other toys and tweaks would be a lot of fun.
In the meantime, I feel like I’m going to slow my nice, fast, new system down by loading on baggage like CS2 and MS Office. Maybe I can do a partial install, skipping over inDesign and Illustrator, which I’ve probably used a total of 3 times each in the past 2 years.
I had trouble with my Leopard install until I unplugged my firewire cable. Oh, and before that, it kept whining about a dirty install disk (which made no sense), so I told it to quit looking for dirt, then. Ta-da!
Otherwise, it worked like a dream. I do like Leopard.
Dunno about how much installing Office would slow down a system, but I found that CS2 (with Version Cue running fulltime, and apps open as necessary) did not drag down the G5 iMac at my then-workplace. A lot of accessories could do the job, though. Reminds me too much of TSR worries back in the DOS days for comfort. How we’ve progressed!
If you find yourself free to muck with Ubuntu sometime, give me a shout — your observations would be *really* interesting. (As an aside, Ubuntu has defaulted to a plane/slide viewport switcher instead of the cube, but it’s easy enough to experiment with the dozens of switchers and effects that are out there.)
Ian — I installed Office and it had no perceptible drag on the system. As for CS2, I installed Photoshop and GoLive (I really do need to get Dreamweaver, as GoLive is now an orphaned product, but I do need at least 1 graphic editor for quick and dirty prototypes). Again, no big drag on the system yet. So far, the only big gap is I haven’t been able to get my calendars back. .Mac syncing is just not working, so I am going to look to my laptop for that piece (that’s how I got my contacts — one big mass export).
Thanks for the offer re Ubuntu. I’d be interested to see how far it’s come along, and what kind of tweaking could be done to make it more like a product that I’d like.
Anne — Strange stuff with the firewire! As for the dirty install disk, yes, I told it to skip the media check the third time around (I figured if the first 2 scans came up with no problems, it wasn’t worth doing yet again). Glad to see you like Leopard. It’s definitely growing on me. If nothing else, it made me clean up my System and App folders.